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Monday, March 18, 2013

Sandwiches in Venice

Mr
Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland,
so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together
after that in Italy.Right now, we're in Venice.

Food in Venice is uniformly expensive and almost
entirely terrible.With so many tourists
passing through the island city, there’s no expectation of repeat custom,
there’s no need for competitive pricing, and, frankly, there’s more than a touch
of ‘sticking it to the foreign hordes’ going on in the front rooms AND the
kitchen.

Finding
good food requires a supernatural level of luck – or much prior research and excellent
map-reading skills.We had done our due
diligence before we arrived, and on our first evening, we ate a very good meal in
a cozy little joint off of the Campo San Maurizio where the prices were only
slightly stratospheric – but after that, we reckoned on mostly doing our own
shopping.

Two streets further back from the Campo San
Maurizio we walked into a little grocery store to buy yogurt and breakfast cereal,
and were sidetracked by sandwiches.

A pile of new rolls sat, steaming gently, in the
middle of the deli counter, filling the whole shop with the round, full smell
of fresh bread.

“Prosciutto.”The grocer said to us.He wasn’t
asking.We nodded, wordlessly, and
watched while he reached for a great haunch of ham, grunting as he lifted its
massive weight, and loaded it onto the meat slicer.

And sliced.

And sliced.

A mound of translucent leaves – milky white and
pink, built up underneath the blade – and he went on slicing, reaching out
occasionally to push the pile aside when it pressed up against the blade.

The leaves of prosciutto were so thin that you
could have read the morning newspaper through any one of them, and the smell -

High and salty and singing – it butted up against
the full smell of fresh bread and we swallowed, involuntarily.

Reaching beneath the deli counter, the grocer
lifted up a wedge of crumbling parmesan cheese – old cheese, with grains of
calcium crystal glittered in its folds and creases, and broke off a knob half
as thick as my fist, crumbling it with his fingers onto the mountain of
prosciutto. Breaking open a bread roll with his hands, he pressed the mountain
of ham and cheese between the two halves of bread, catching up stray crumbs of
cheese and pressing them in with his fingers, and twisted up the whole thing
into a square of greaseproof paper.

It was a primitive, overloaded proto-sandwich,
and it was so sweetly, saltily, fresh-in-the-morning GOOD that we went
back.And back again.Twice a day.THAT is how you eat in Venice on a budget.The cafes and Pizza joints can go stuff
themselves with their own fish.Go to
the grocery and buy fresh sandwiches.

About Me

I am an Australian architect, married to a Canadian who followed me home.
In September 2011 we relocated from rural South Australia to the bustling metropolis of Santiago, Chile, where it's warmer than Canada, but less insect-y than Australia.
How's that for a compromise?